Dublin Institute of Technology
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Fine Arts
2013-06-11
Pharmacologies of Texts and Images
Noel Fitzpatrick
Dublin Institute of Technology, [email protected]
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Fitxpatrick, N. (2013) Pharmacologies of Texts and Images. European Society of Aesthetics, Charles University, Prague, June, 2013.
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Pharamcologies of Images and Texts : Prague, June 2013.
To begin with I would like to highlight how the problematic that I am
raising here today relates to a set of concerns within which I find myself
currently, as the Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and
Media, an initiative which brings together four Colleges on the island of
Ireland North and South students undertake PhDs in the creative arts
and media. The problematic of the relationship between ‘textual
representation’ and ‘visual representation’ is omnipresent. At the
Graduate School we have brought this under a research cluster that we
call Ekphrasis. Within Art Colleges in Europe at the moment a tension
between the establishment of practice based research in the creative arts
and more traditional humanities based research, this was borne out
again recently at the SHARE conference in Brussels in May 2013. At
the centre of the debate is the relationship between the construction of
knowledge at PhD level through practice and theory. Therefore, the
problematic of the relationship between theory and practice, or to
oversimplify it for a moment between ‘text’ and ‘image’ is one of my
central concerns. I will use the term Ekphrasis to refer to this translation
from one medium to another from text to image or image to text. The
term Ekhprais will be used here loosely to encapsulate the relationship
between language, text and image. However, what I wish to point to
here today is the complexity this relationship and to do so I will turn to
my own area of current research which is investigating the work of
Bernard Stiegler. This paper, will, rather than give an exhaustive
account of Ekphrasis, attempt to mobilise Stiegler’s latest works and
some of its key concepts, namely Pharmacology and individuation, in
the hope of promoting discussion through a set of questions it raises in
relation to the nature of the text and the nature of the image. The
concept of Ekphrasis has a specific historical trajectory, from the Greek
ek phrasis, literarly to ‘out’ ‘speak’, to ‘speak out’, to name an object,
to more contemporary usages that define Ekphrasis as the ‘verbal
representation of visual representation’ (James Heffernan 1991). Plato
in The Phradreus, which I will return to at some length later on, alludes
1 to a comparison between writing and images, whilst the word Ekphrasis
is not used directly in the dialogue, writing is compared to painting
whose works present themselves ‘as if they are alive’, ‘it continues to
signify the same thing forever’. The commonality between texts and
images is therefore established early on in the history of philosophy.
The work of Bernard Stiegler and his group Ars Industrialis have
recently become more and more prevalent within media studies and
contemporary critical theory, critical theory meant in the widest sense
from Frankfurt School Critical theory to French philosophy. His
development of a particular critique of contemporary uses of
technology and new media is finding more and more currency. His
recent works on pharmacology are direct developments of previous
concerns explored in his first major work Technics and Time Three
Volume which have now appeared in English, the third volume
appeared in 2010. However, for this paper, I would like to focus firstly
on the key concept of pharmacology which he been developing since
the publication of De la Pharmacologie : Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la
peine d’etre vecue in 2010. In order to give a succinct and clear
exposition of the development of what Stiegler terms ‘de la
pharmacologie positive’ it is necessary for me to revisit the
development
of
the
notion
of
pharmacology.
So
What
is
Pharmacology? The brief response, is the study of the poison as cure or
cure the as poison, once could think of the dosages of the
pharmacological product. However, this would oversimplify, the
philosophical nuances which Stiegler plays through by returning to the
analysis of Derrida and Plato of the role of the pharmakon. Coupled
with this philosophical trajectory of the analysis of writing as
pharmakon Stigler expounds on a concept of technology inspired by the
research in anthropology and Le RoiGouhran and the study of the Mode
D’Existence des Objets Technique by Simondon. As we shall see
shortly, writing is a privileged example of the pharmakon, but in
addition, the advent of digital technologies and writing poses specific
problematics in relation to reading and writing. This will shall return to
2 in a moment. Nonetheless, as I stated previously, my concern here will
be the focus on the philosophical concept of pharmakon as a means of
access to the problematic of Ekphrasis. In order to do so I will begin by
exploring the notion of the text, an issue which Stiegler raises in
relation to reading in general and one which I have developed
elsewhere as digital surface reading. Once we have established the
problematic of the pharmacology in reading I would like to attempt to
raise the question of the pharmakon in relation to other partner of
Ekphrasis the image.
The paper is therefore, broken down into 4 distinct parts, the first part
will explore the pharmacology of writing, taking the advent of digital
writing as a pharmacological process which has inherent difficulties
with it, the second part will outline the philosophical basis of the
Pharmakon, the third part will explore the relationship between texts
and images and finally I will look into more detail at one Artistic
practice which challenges any simple opposition be text and image.
Part I
I would like first to explore how reading and writing are presented as a
problematic for Stiegler, his exploration of the problematic of writing
starts out by referring to research which has become dominant in the US
in relation to reading and hyper attention, reading and distraction. In
terms of the pharmacology this could be understand as the ‘poisonous’
aspect of the pharmakon. The rejection of writing in the Phradreus by
Plato is based upon, according to Derrida, of an understanding of
writing as ‘poisonous’ because writing is a form of automatic memory
(Hypomnesis). There is an interesting parallel which Stiegler develops
in relation to the rejection of digital reading as a form of surface
reading.
Catherine Hayles (2007) in a text entitled Hyper and Deep
Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive modes sets out to
understand why students in third level education are reading less and
less in the humanities. She demonstrates that there is a cognitive divide
between generations. Generation M are finding it more difficult to read
novels because of their inability to attend to the texts for sustained
3 periods of reading. Hayles (2007) argues that there is an opposition
between the types of attention involved in different media, print and
digital, and that reading as an activity requires deep attention while the
use of digital technologies necessitates hyper-attention. The skipping
from screen to screen reflects a more profound problematic of
inattention:
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the
humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for
long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli
while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and
having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper-attention is
characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks,
preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of
stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom (Hayles,
2007, p. 187).
The hyper-attention involved in switching rapidly from task to task is,
therefore, a form of inattention, leading to the inability to concentrate
for sustained periods of time. Hayles (2007) points to the development
of a generation in America where deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) is on the increase. Ritalin, the drug used to treat children with
ADHD stimulates the brain so that the activity is increased, the drug
acting as cortical stimulant. Hyperactivity is therefore sustained, to
avoid boredom setting in. If Carr (2011) The Shallows : What the
Internet is doing to Our Brians and Bauerlein (2008) The Dumbest
Generation: How the Digital Stupefies Young People and Jeopardises
our Future highlight hyper-attention or inattention as part of digital
reading, Hayles (2007) links it to a wider issue in relation to digital
technologies and the development of other forms of inattention.
However, Hayles (2007) does not dismiss technologies as the
‘scapegoat’ but attempts to offer examples of how hyper-attention and
attention could be developed as specific pedagogical strategies, where
e-learning or blended learning could harness the technologies of
hyperactivity for positive use. The emergence of serious games, for
example, highlights the positive learning opportunities afforded by the
use of gaming technologies in education. Positive aspects thus include
the ability to handle multiple tasks and to strategise. The positive
4 therapeutic conditions are possible, therefore, within the pharmakon
itself. Hyper-attention and attention should not therefore be seen as
mutually exclusive; ADHD may be an extreme point on the continuum
of inattention, yet hyper-attention linked to digital technologies could
be used to engage new generations into more sustained attention. She
concludes by stating:
Whether inclined toward deep or hyper-attention, toward one side
or another of the generational divide separating print from digital
culture, we cannot afford to ignore the frustrating, zesty, and
intriguing ways in which the two cognitive modes interact. Our
responsibilities as educators, not to mention our position as
practitioners of the literary arts, require nothing less (Hayles, 2007,
p. 198).
The design of reading activities in higher education must include
educational opportunities which enable the two cognitive forms to
interact. However, the problematic of reading in the twenty first century
is not just about cognition. Reading has also become part of a powerful
and commercially successful ‘reading industry’, a term coined by
Giffard (2009) to describe an industry which seeks the traces we leave
on the web as part of our daily reading activity and offers them as a
good to be bought, sold and monetized.
The relationship between prelectio and digital reading is that both
are based on reading for information and not reading for content. The
type of reading offered by early pre-web screen reading is akin to the
monastic prelectio for word separation. As Giffard (2009) points out:
Before the web, in the practice of reading on a screen, the text is
not the objective of the reader. Rather is it a control reading, a
certain way to decipher and survey the informations (sic) and
operations of the computer. And reading is submitted to another
activity that is the real goal. Credit card, word processor,
phototypesetting are examples of such a “reading on a screen”.
Umberto Eco has said “word processor e una machina molto
spirituale” but reading functionalities of word processor are not
spirituals at all” (Section “Digital reading is reading”, para. 4).
Reading on screen is akin to the prelectio, reading for information, a
control reading to ensure that the information being portrayed is correct
or incorrect. This functional reading is not a spiritual one of meditation
i.e., lectio. Giffard (2009) argues that this form of reading for
5 information is inherent in any screen reading and is now so widespread
as to be second nature to our relationship with digital technologies. The
affordances of the technologies in place lead to the predominance of a
prelectio.
Embedded in ‘digital reading’ is a form of hyper-attention because
the reader is distracted from the principal task at hand. The model of
comprehension of the text is interrupted by the technology itself; there
is a distraction built into the very interface of the digital technology
being used. The reader is cognitively aware of choices being made or
not made at the same time that reading takes place. This leads to what is
referred to as cognitive overflow. Reading in itself is a highly
challenging cognitive activity – a young child learning to read is the
proof of how challenging it can be – and in addition to this complex
cognitive activity, digital reading intersperses supplementary cognitive
demands such as hyperlinks. Hyperlinks, which may or may not be
clicked on, act as a distraction from the principal task at hand. In
addition, there is the distraction inherent to the very interface, the
technology, the screen renewing, the backlight, the layout of the page
on screen and often the use of poor typography. The challenges of
reading online lead to distraction:
As opposed to the relative linearity of printed text, the very
appearance of digital information at once presents both new
richness and new challenges for the online reader. The fluid,
multimodal nature of digital information enables online readers to
become immersed in a subject, both visually and verbally. Even as
this presentation of material in several different modes provides the
reader with multiple points of entry into a subject, it also opens the
door to great distraction. It further requires that the reader
understand how to evaluate visual information and make meaning
in and across several different modalities (Wolf & Barzillai, 2009,
p. 135).
All of these lead to a distraction within the distraction, a type of hyperattention which leads to a surface reading of the text, and this constant
distraction is an object of criticism, as discussed above. The distraction
impinges on the reader’s ability to move from surface to deep reading, a
reading that enables reflection and understanding, and which for Saint
6 Augustine allowed the development of the spirit (Outler, 1955). But
Giffard (2011) also posits a positive alternative to this deterministic
vision of technology:
Evoquons enfin une autre orientation de Carr et ce qu’il faut bien
appeler sa vision déterministe de la technique. L’auteur semble
prisonnier de l’hypothèse de McLuhan selon laquelle le medium
définit le message. D’autre part, il n’envisage pas la possibilité que
le lecteur, par un régime d’exercices appropriés, puisse conquérir
son autonomie par rapport au dispositif technique, voire le
détourner. Le formatage de la lecture par l’internet est la logique
qui s’impose à l’exclusion de toute autre” (Giffard, 2011, section
“Une vision déterministe de la technique, para. 1).
Lastly to mention Carr’s other orientation and which must be
called his determinist vision of technology. The author seems to be
a prisoner of McLuhan’s hypothesis according to which the
medium is the message. In addition, he does not envisage the
possibility that through a mechanism of appropriate exercises the
reader could attain their autonomy in relation to the technological
dispositive, or even overcome it. The formatting of reading by the
internet is a logic which imposes itself to the exclusion of any
other.
In opposition to the outright rejection of digital reading as a form of
surface reading Giffard (2011) is proposing to go beyond Carr’s (2011)
deterministic view of digital technologies and offers positive
alternatives.
To further explore how this positive alternative may develop, it is
necessary to place the debate within a philosophical context of the
notion of the text: reading and writing as a form of problematic. Whilst
this is a well-rehearsed argument within contemporary philosophy it is
necessary here to revisit a recent development in the understanding of
writing as a pharmakon (Ricoeur, 2004). Stiegler (2010) has developed
what he terms a positive pharmacology or therapeutic. In the quotation
from Giffard (2011) above we can glimpse how this positive
pharmacology could come to fruition in relation to digital reading. The
criticism which is made of Carr’s (2011) position could be summarised
in terms of an over emphasis upon the negative aspect of digital reading
7 which leads the positing of surface reading, the prelectio, as the
ultimate end point of all digital reading.
In the background to Stiegler’s (2010) analysis of a positive
pharmacology is the analysis of writing as a pharmakon. Stiegler (2010)
retraces the philosophical debate in relation to reading and writing as
problematic back through Derrida (1981) to Plato. There is an irony
here, as Plato was opposed to writing as a pharmakon, something which
was not good for the brain and not good for memory. Analyses of
digital reading show a similar reticence: digital reading, it is argued,
leads to a form of reading which is also bad for the brain because it
leads to a form of hyper-attention. Derrida (1981) in his work
Dissemination wrote a long essay entitled Plato’s Pharmacy. This text
has become a central part of the canon of philosophical texts in relation
to the development of Derrida’s (1981) shift from grammatology to
deconstruction. In this essay Derrida (1981) gives a sustained microreading of Plato’s (370 BC/1985) Phaedrus, with a critique of Plato’s
position on writing as a pharmakon, that is, a cure and a poison.
Pharmakon is the etymological root of pharmacology, the study of cure
as poison and poison as cure. Writing, for Plato, is a poison in the sense
that writing divorces speech from meaning. The absence of the
interlocutor leads to a position whereby the text could say what the
writer did not intend it to say. Writing enables the misconstruction of
meaning; the absence of the speaker leads to untruth. Derrida (1981)
describes this as the phonocentric position that Plato holds. Writing is
also a poison in relation to memory/reminding:
The fact is that this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness
in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need
to exercise their memories [...], being able to rely on what is
written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien to
themselves [...] rather than, from within, their own unaided powers
to call things to mind [...]. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for
reminding, that you discovered (oukoun mnẽmẽs, alla
hupomnẽseõs, pharmakon hẽures). And as for wisdom [...], you’re
equipping your pupils with only a semblance [...] of it, not with
truth (Plato, 370 BC/1985, 274e-275b, cited in Derrida, 1981, pp.
104- 105, emphasis in original).
8 The pharmakon is here played out in its ambiguity, it is not a cure for
memory (mnemes) but for reminding (hypomnesis), this latter refers to
the act of technical regurgitation, an artificial memory, a mechanism of
reminding. It is therefore to repeat without thought. The distinction
which Plato/Socrates makes is between memory and artificial memory.
True memory takes the form of the dialectic, dialogos through which
truth can disclose itself as alethea. For Plato writing does not enable
anamnesis, true memory, but enables a mechanical repetition which
does not lead to the truth. Writing is a form of hypomnesis, an artificial
holding place of memory, a mechanism for repetition and not thought.
This is where the ambiguity of the word pharmakon comes to the fore.
Derrida’s (1981) critique of Plato and by extension of all Western
metaphysics is grounded in his criticism of Plato’s rejection of writing.
However, more recently with the work of Stiegler (2010) this criticism
was revisited, and the opposition between anamnesis and hypomnesis as
outlined by Derrida (1981) now leads to a positive pharmacology, the
remedy. Derrida (1981) never envisaged the curative aspect of
pharmacology, the positive pharmacology which Stiegler (2010) posits.
Stiegler (2010) develops an understanding of the pharmakon as cure
and poison, building upon Derrida’s (1981) identification of the
semantics of remedy that are present in Plato’s text:
We hope to display in the most striking manner the regular,
ordered polysemy that has, through skewing, indetermination, or
overdetermination, but without mistranslation, permitted the
rendering of the same word by “remedy”, “recipe”, “poison”,
“drug”, “philter”, etc. It will also be seen to what extent the
malleable unity of this concept, or rather its rules and the strange
logic that links it with its signifier, has been dispersed, masked,
obliterated, and rendered almost unreadable not only by the
imprudence or empiricism of the translators, but first and foremost
by the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty of translation (Derrida,
1981, p. 77).
The pharmakon as cure and poison demonstrates the difficulty of
language to hold a primacy of meaning, a unity of signification. Indeed
the pharmakon demonstrates the dispersal of the signifier which is the
9 very basis of Derrida’s (1981) deconstruction. Derrida’s (1981) primary
challenge is that Plato’s critique of writing as used by the Sophists
relates to the idea that it is essentially a poison for reminding and not
for memory.
For Stiegler (2010), writing is the very condition of thinking
itself, a process of meta-categorisation which is essential to a reflective,
recursive process:
Le pharmakon, qu’est l’écriture – comme hypomnésis,
hypomnématon, c’est-à-dire mémoire artificielle – est ce dont
Platon combat les effets empoisonnants et artificieux en y opposant
l’anamnésis : la pensée “par soi-même”, c’est-à-dire l’autonomie
de la pensée” (p. 13, emphasis in original).
The pharmakon, which is writing – as hypomnesis,
hypomnematon, that is to say artificial memory – is that of which
Plato fights the noxious and artificial effects by opposing it to
anamnesis: thinking for oneself, i.e., the autonomy of thought.
Writing is poisonous because it is a form of artificial memory which
leads to forgetfulness, memory is exteriorised in the tekhnē itself as a
form of mnemotechnics. The affordances of technology for digital
reading lead to a form of forgetfulness, all technology leads to a form of
forgetfulness. Digital technologies function as placeholders for
memory, in the same way as, for Plato, writing functions as placeholder
for speech. For Stiegler (2010), there is an inherent link between the
development of technologies and a proletarianisation of knowledge
which leads ultimately to a loss of knowledge:
A cet égard, le pharmakon constitue un facteur de prolétarisation
de l’esprit (de perte de savoir) tout comme la machine-outil
prolétarisera les corps des ouvriers producteurs (les privera de leur
savoir-faire) (p. 40, emphasis in original).
In this way, the Pharmakon constitutes a factor of proletarnisation
of the spirit (loss of knowledge) just as the machine-tool
proletarised the bodies of the manual workers (Which took away
their know how).
The consequence of the pharmakon is the loss of knowledge. The
concept of forgetfulness which Plato highlights in relation to writing is
10 developed and expanded by Stiegler (2010) in relation to all forms of
technology. For Stiegler (2010) the loss of knowledge leads to the
pharmacological situation representative of the contemporary situation
in the West: financial, political and social crisis. However, it is
necessary to point out that this should not be misconstrued as a
rejection of the technology of writing or technology itself.
Stiegler (2010) is mindful of the current of thought which uses
technology as the scapegoat, as a pharmakos, for all the failures and
shortcomings of society, a current of thought which rejects the
technologies (of the spirit). This trend does not take into account that
the very spirit itself is at the origin and constitutive of the pharmakon or
the pharma-logico:
Rien n’est plus légitime que ces luttes philosophiques contre ce
qui, dans la technique ou la technologie, est toxique pour la vie de
l’esprit. Mais face à ce qui, dans le pharmakon, constitue la
possibilité d’un affaiblissement de l’esprit, ces luttes choisissent
aussi d’ignorer la constitution originairement pharma-logique de
l’esprit lui-même. Elles choisissent d’ignorer la pharmacologie de
l’esprit en faisant du pharmakon en général un pharmakos : un
bouc émissaire – celui des pratiques sacrificielles en Grèce
ancienne polythéiste, que l’on trouve également en Judée, ou ce
pharmakos est chargé, comme le sera le Christ, de toutes fautes
qu’il emmène vers une région inaccessible (Stiegler, 2010, p. 40,
emphasis in original).
Nothing is more legitimate than the philosophical disputes against
that which, in the technic or the technology, are toxic for the spirit.
But against which, in the pharmakon, constitutes the possibility of
the weakening of the spirit/mind, the disputes choose to ignore the
original pharma-logic constitution of this spirit itself. They choose
to ignore the pharmacology of the spirit by making the pharmakon
in general a pharmakos: a scapegoat, the scapegoat of the
polytheist ancient Greece, which is also found in Judea, where the
pharmakos is charged, as will Christ, with all the faults that he
brings him to an inaccessible region.
Stiegler (2010) contends that technology is part and parcel of who we
are and writing is a form of technology which enables reflection to
develop, that there are elements of technology which are poisonous to
the mind, but there is a pharmacology of the spirit. Writing, Painting,
11 Drawing are all forms of exteriorization which are part of a process of
individuation and transindividuation. As he states in 2008
To write a manuscript is to organize thought by consigning it
outside in the form of traces, that is, symbols, whereby thought can
reflect on itself, actually constituting itself, making itself
repeatable and transmissible: it becomes knowledge. To sculpt to
paint, to draw is to go forth to an encounter with the tangibility of
the visible, it is to with one’s hands while giving to be seen, that is,
to be seen again: it is train the eye of the beholder and, thus, to
sculpt, to paint, to draw this eye- it is to transform it.
Looking becomes a process of reconstitution and transformation, just
like with reading there is a process of reconstitution of writing, to read
you have to be able to write, to write you have to be able to read. This is
something akin to the informed reader who can reconstitute the writing
process through reading, the informed onlooker can also reconstitute the
painting. The placeholder for memory of writing is akin to the
placeholder for memory in painting. Painting is perhaps an easy point
of comparison, the gesture of the painter is held within the strokes and
traces on the canvas, the onlooker, informed onlooker can reconstitute
the gests. However, this for the painter the relationship is different, the
hypomnesis, is contained within the painting itself, the gesture is
exteriorized through the painting itself. It acts as a trace of the corporal
memory of the painter which is different to the relationship that the
onlooker has with the painting. We individuate ourselves according to
Stiegler by ‘making the passage to the act of a potential that lies within
every noetic soul’, the onlooker, to keep to the example of painting has
a potential that the work releases within the recipient of the work, this
potentiality comes into being through the work.
For the artist as a hyper-sensitive spectator (hyper-sensitive in the
sense also that one speaks of the photosensitivity of paper covered
with silver halides), what a work sets in action is that it affects him
12 as a recipient in such a way that it engenders another work through
which he becomes a sender.
This process of individuating is one which takes place over time, they
can take a very long time to develop. The process is also one of coindividuation, one never individuates by oneself. However, there are
processes of short-circuiting, whereby the long term development of coindividuation is shorted, for example through processes of inattention
refered to earlier in relation to reading where skimming the surface is
mistaken for reading, similarly in relation to painting, according to
statistics in 2005, the average person spends forty-two seconds in front
of each painting, where the images are skimmed and not afforded due
attention. Accordingly, the prevalence of images does lead to visual
literacy, the informed onlooker needs attention patience or as Lyotard
states ‘patiance’.
The example of painting is itself problematic, when one looks to
contemporary artistic practice the wealth of cultural production happens
in and across multiple mediums and in and through different corporal
experience outside of on-looking and involving participation or dare I
say relational experiences. For example, at DOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel
last September the majority of works on display would fall outside the
neat categories that we have being using so far in relation to a
separation between text and image. Hence, it would be worthwhile here
for a moment taking an example which is much more complex and
perhaps more akin to contemporary artistic practice where there is an
inherent relationship between research and practice, theory and praxis.
An example of an Artist and Artistic praxis which unfolds this
dichotomy of ‘text’ and ‘image’ whose emphasis on the materiality of
the object itself or one could add the yet to be realized materiality is the
Artist Lawrence Weiner. Weiner’s work from the late 1960s onwards
has explored the use of language rather than the more conventional
idioms of painting or sculpture. His work foregrounds language as a
13 mode of representation, which as Lynne Cooke points out, eliminates
all references to authorial subjectivity- all traces of the artist’s hands,
his skill, or his taste’. However, one could argue that language itself
never enables the completion exclusion of the traces of the enunciator.
The process of individuation-transindividuation referred to earlier finds
an echo in the way in which Weiner conceives of the ‘individual work
need never being actually realized’, the endless differing or differal of
the work is shifted onto the audience, the onlooker or interlocutor. He
states that “each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist,
the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of
the reception”. The realization of the materiality of the work, the
presentation and context of the work are only determined if and when a
particular work is installed, the choice of the medium- whether, for
example, the letters are stenciled, painted, or mounted in relief, and in
what typeface, size, proportions, placement, and color – varies with the
site; similarly, the context – whether a poster, artist’s book, gallery
wall, mural, or other public area – necessarily inflects not only the
work’s form but the its very meaning. To take one example in detail, his
work entitled ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL
ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (1968) is a direct reference
to the work of Jackson Pollock who spontaneous drip paintings where
gaining more and more attention at the time. We know that the paints
Pollock used have caused some issues in relation to the preservation
and are raising questions around the extent to which they should be
restored, if at all, to their original state. Weiner points to the very
materiality of the painting object itself, however, interestingly for our
problematic here, this pointing to the object itself takes place through a
linguistic representation of the thing itself. Weiner by removing the
conventions of Pollock’s work, the rectangular field of painting, the
intentional, albeit spontaneous drip painting, invokes the process rather
than the product itself. In addition, Weiner has placed his work outside
‘aesthetically contracted space’, his work is to be found on murals,
stairs ways, the work exists in culture at large.
In contemporary
practice, the conceptual turn, the linguistic turn as still very much
14 present and the simple division between the process of verbal
representation and visual representation needs to be treated with care.
The symbolic misery that Stiegler refers as part of contemporary
condition, where images have become advertising bill boards, and data
banks of images to be bought and sold through monetizing networks.
The cultural technologies of images, sounds and texts together with the
cognitive technologies shape the technologies of the spirit. The
pharmacological dimension to these technologies of the spirit causes a
struggle between the ‘poisonous’ and the ‘therapeutic’ effects, which
can according to Stiegler reinforce the situation of symbolic misery
where the harnessing of attention leads to a destructive consumerism
whose effects have now become evident since the collapse of 2008 or
positive pharmacology could appear where there is a renaissance of the
symbolic which would be grounded in the reconstruction of the
bidirectional
social
relations,
that
is,
dialogue,
or
possibly
‘interactivity’. The possibility of the positive pharmacology lies within
the artistic creation, the ability to move and the open out the potential . I
see as I have tried to argue here today, the relationship between the
construction of knowledge through the artistic practice as not being
dissociated, not a simple dichotomy between words and images,
between practice and theory, the praxis itself poses the recipient with
the potential of the work and the necessary attending to work which
enables the potential. The two key concepts referred to here,
pharmacology and individuation, allow the framing of the question in
new and productive way.
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